Incidents in the Life of a White Woman: Economies of Race and Gender in the Antebellum Nation

Abstract

This essay reconstructs the title of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in order to intervene in accounts of American literary history that view nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican writing as resisting, and thus deriving from, alreadyin-place models of discourse. By uncovering within Southern-yet still national-discourses of domesticity and sentimentality a countertradition that predates US literary history, I want to offer a critical genealogy of the antebellum plantation novel that revises the dependent relationship of African-American narrative to dominant literary models by suggesting that socially and commercially validated literature arises as a reaction to black autobiography and fiction. Yet this substitution of white woman for girl seems to dismiss attention given to minority writers over the past two decades and return to a canon of American literature that historically displaced and discounted black narrative expression. My argument seeks to recall and question this creation of a prototypical literary canon by examining how antebellum Southern writers subdued black narrative as part of the formation of a self-consciously national literature. Just as slave labor sustained the class privilege of landowners, African-American literary discourse was necessary to clean the national house of fiction. With repeated scenes of family separation, sexual harassment, and outraged motherhood, a text like Incidents certainly troubles the quaint domesticity of that house; however, as a muted presence whose stolen articulations are subsumed by feminist complaints of Southern belles, the warped slave narrative that is held hostage by the plantation novel ransoms an embattled and conflicted American national identity by appealing to womanhood. AfricanAmerican texts launch severe critiques that give evidence of a house divided, but once repressed and transfigured by an ideol-